#Instapaper highlights how to#

You’ll probably find yourself revisiting certain notes via search. Here are two types of customized searches: It’s pretty easy to set up customized searches in Evernote to give yourself the best odds of surfacing up the right note. Your Evernote will probably include lots of other documents like receipts, emails, and clippings that you’ll want to exclude from your search when you’re reviewing your notes. Step 5: Create custom searches (and then save them) As an example, here are my notes for the piece on masculinity (which I sent to my humanities notebook). Once these steps are complete, I “steal” from the GTD approach and move the fully annotated note out of the Default notebook and into the corresponding notebook. I don’t use the Evernote’s tag functionality, simply because it takes too much time. These can include, the sender, author, publication, keywords just to give my future self a better chance of surfacing up the article via search. Then at the bottom of the note, I quickly drop in a stream of consciousness list of tags that are associated with the article. I don’t overthink this step, but the two levels give your notes visual cues that “age well.” For context, a standard blog post might have two highlighted paragraphs and a longform piece 7-10. I then use two levels of annotation using Forte’s Progressive Summarization approach: bold (important) and highlights (more important). What you’re left with is effectively a bunch of paragraphs you find interesting. Step 4: Annotating in EvernoteĪs I’m highlighting, IFTTT automatically generates a single note in the Default notebook. It’s important to grab entire paragraphs, so that you can preserve the context for later dates.

As I read, I highlight entire paragraphs that I find interesting. (An awesome use case has been using this system on Wikipedia pages).

I read everything (except for books) via Instapaper. This will be important when we discuss searching. I then aggregate all of these notebooks into an Evernote Stack (which I call Resources). The LJ is a personal abbreviation for Learning Journal and the categories should be self-explanatory.

Personally, I use the following five notebooks: It’s important to have a consistent place to store your notes. Step 2: Configure your Evernote notebooks Once the three apps are set up, connect them using the IFTTT recipe: Append Instapaper highlights to Evernote. You’re probably less familiar with IFTTT, a service that allows different apps to “talk to each other” without any coding experience. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work with Pocket (which does not have a native highlighting feature).

#Instapaper highlights how to#

I probably don’t need to explain how to get an Evernote and Instapaper account (both components of our productivity stack). This system is almost entirely the result of taking RadReader Tiago Forte’s class Building A Second Brain ( note: Affiliate Link). (Kindle notes require a slightly different workflow). I wrote about the system’s first principles and today wanted to specifically lay out how I use three apps: Instapaper, Evernote, and IFTTT to take notes on anything I read on the web. But I mostly attribute it to having an integrated digital system for aggregating all of my notes from the blogs, articles, and books that I read. Yes, this can be attributed to developing a consistent writing practice. The crazy part? They only take about an hour to write. For the past six months I’ve written a 700-ish word postscript in the weekly newsletter. I’m going to let you in on a little secret.